The Ignoranceof Blood

22

Granja de las Once Higeras – Tuesday, 19th September 2006, 04.47 hrs

The shots, two dull thuds, simultaneous. First Consuelo, then Falcon fell forward, their positions on the edge of the hole too precarious to avoid it. Their reluctance gave them a slight advantage over the Russians, who had no choice. They fell like two beef carcasses, their knees knocking into the backs of their erstwhile victims, taking them to the grave. The torch beam still cast its light across the dark hole and lit up the black, gaping wounds in the back of the heads of the two men, who had landed face down in the pit. Consuelo, trapped under the legs of the inert Russian, was struggling and whimpering with panic. A man landed on his feet next to them. His face was covered in dark paint and his camouflage outfit was just visible in the torch beam. He heaved the slack limbs of the executioners away so that Falcon and Consuelo could roll out. The man put his fingers to the necks of the dead Russians.

'How many inside?' he asked, in heavily accented Spanish.

'Two Russians and a Cuban,' said Falcon.

'Stay here… in the hole,' he said, and scrambled out.

Other men rushed past. It was impossible to say how many. It was too dark. One of them kicked the torch into the pit. Falcon pulled Consuelo silently towards him. He sat with his back to the wall of the pit. She crouched between his legs, his arms encircling her. The smell of earth was as thick as chocolate, sweet as life. They heard nothing. They waited. The stars emitted their ancient, uncertain light. The smell of the lake filled the hole with the promise of further days. He kissed her hand, perfume and dirt. Her knuckles wriggled on his lips.

A loud bang. Consuelo started, dropped her head on to her raised knees. Muffled shots. Silence. After a while an engine started up. The digger in the barn. It reversed out. Headlights illuminated the night on the other side of the farmhouse. The digger's engine farted up and growled forward. It stopped for a minute or two and then continued slowly. The beams of light swung round, settled over the pit, crawled forward, narrowing. Falcon stood up. The silhouette of a man approached, walking in front of the digger.

'It's safe now,' said a voice.

A hand came down. Falcon lifted Consuelo towards it and she was hauled out. She started running immediately. The hand came down again. Falcon walked up the earth wall of the pit and out. He moved to one side as the digger came through. Consuelo had fallen down twenty metres away. The digger tipped its bucket and two bodies fell into the pit on top of the inert Russians. Consuelo scrambled to her feet and ran again. The man shouted an order in Russian. Two men came out from behind the farmhouse, caught hold of her, held her there. She struggled but didn't seem to have much left in her.

The man turned to him, his painted face unreal in the harsh light from the digger.

'The boy is there… room on right as you enter, but…'

'They said he was under sedation.'

'He's not breathing. Pillow on face. Maybe two hours ago,' said the man. 'Look before her. Not good.'

'They killed him?'

'You knew the boy?' asked the man, nodding.

'They smothered him with a pillow?' said Falcon, again, completely mystified.

'Hours ago. Before you here. Nothing you could do.'

'Why would they do that?' asked Falcon; the Inspector Jefe, who'd never seen the logic of murder, whose job it was to return sanity to the grossly illogical, was dumbfounded. 'They had no reason to do that.'

'These people not think like that,' said the man. 'Go now. She very unhappy.'

Consuelo was screaming herself helpless in the arms of the two men. She wasn't fighting them, all her fight had gone into hysterical, wounded animal screaming. He ran over to her. They laid her down on the ground. She stopped as if choked when Falcon's face came into her vision.

'What's happened?' she said, weakly. 'What have they done?'

'I'm going to go in there now to have a look at things,' said Falcon. 'When I'm ready, in a minute or two, then you come in. All right?'

She looked at him as if he was a doctor who'd just told her that she was going to die, but there was a good chance of it being peaceful.

'Tell me,' she said, too emotionally exhausted to speak properly.

'I'm going to take a look,' he said, stroking her face. 'I'll call for you. Two minutes. Count the seconds.'

He trotted over the rough ground to the farmhouse, ducked through the low front door. Off to the left, the laptop and disks still on the table, three chairs blown over, the remains of a stun grenade in the corner. Beyond the table, through the door, the Cuban, stripped naked, tied to a chair, arms hooked over the high back, ankles secured to the legs, thighs apart, genitals exposed, wild, animal fear in his eyes.

'Not for you,' said a heavily accented voice to his right. 'In here.'

He went to the door, wiped the sweat out of his eyes, tried to calm himself down. He searched for that professional distance. Nothing there. The door was hanging ajar. A beefy Russian, with painted face and a handgun, thick cylindrical silencer attached, beckoned him. He forced himself through it, found his throat clogging with grief which, only a moment before, had been breathing in the damp earth with relief. As he crossed the threshold, playing soccer in the garden with Dario flickered through the gate of his mind, and he wasn't sure whether he could cope with this.

The room was lit by a kerosene lamp. The light was a slow, fluid yellow. There was a single bed, metal frame, pushed up against the wall. The windows were shuttered and had a metal bar across them, padlocked. Dario was lying face up, head still under the smothering pillow, bare chest. His right arm lay by his side, his left arm formed a right-angle, fist closed by his head. A sheet lay over his torso, legs awry underneath, the feet sticking out. His right foot was bandaged. There was a dark stain on the sheet where the blood had soaked through.

'Skinny kid,' thought Falcon, pushing himself forward. 'Always on the move.'

Falcon felt for a wrist pulse, but he knew a dead body when he saw one. He set the legs straight, brought the arms down by the boy's side, reorganized the sheet over the body, and that was when he saw it. A large scar, as of a messy appendix operation. He checked under the armpit for the 'strawberry' that Consuelo had talked about, but the light was not good in the room. And for the first time he brought himself to look under the pillow. Even now he peeled it back slowly, flinchingly, as if he was going to see something he didn't want to. The face staring up at him, wide-eyed, purple-lipped was not Dario's.

'Bring me a torch,' he said.

The big Russian came in. Falcon pointed at his belt. He handed the torch over. Falcon shone it in the boy's face. Still not Dario.

'What?' asked the Russian.

'It's not the boy.'

'I don't understand.'

Falcon went out into the night. This time he was angry, almost insanely angry. He called for Consuelo and they released her, lifted her to her feet. She stumbled towards him over the uneven ground. He caught her.

'It's not Dario,' he said. 'Dario is not dead.'

'Who is it?' she asked, utterly confused.

'A dead boy,' said Falcon. 'A nameless, dead boy.'

They ducked in through the doorway, went into the room. Falcon shut the door behind him with his foot. It slammed to. Consuelo knelt by the bed, held on to the boy's arm and shook her head and sobbed as she stared into his inert face.

Falcon undid the bandage on the boy's foot.

'They cut off his toe,' he said, beside himself with rage. 'They cut off the poor boy's toe.'

Consuelo sat on the floor with her back to the bed and started crying, huge racking sobs came up as if from her pelvis, physically lifting her off the clay tiles. It lasted for a few minutes until she got a hold of herself.

'I can't take any of this in,' she said. 'You'll have to explain it to me.'

'They didn't have Dario,' he said. 'They never had Dario. They played a game to see if they could get what they wanted.'

'But Revnik doesn't have Dario either,' said Consuelo. 'We know that. He's told us.'

'That was why Donstov's man called us back,' said Falcon. 'You were right. He was nervous. You'd enraged him by telling him that Revnik claimed to have Dario, which was why he cut off this boy's toe. Then he calmed down. Came back with the incentive just in case you were bluffing him. He had nothing to lose by trying to pretend that he had Dario, and it worked. He brought everything forward, made everybody work under pressure. And there is, of course, the possibility that he still has a friend in Revnik's group.'

'But who's got Dario?' said Consuelo.

'I don't know.'

The sound of a muffled scream came from the other room.

'Take me away from this place,' she said. 'These are hell's people in here.'

They went out into the main room. The Spanish speaker was back.

'What is the problem?' he asked.

'The boy is not her son,' said Falcon. 'We don't know who he is.'

'He must be,' he said, looking at the door.

'I know my own son,' said Consuelo.

'Stay there. Don't move.'

The Spanish speaker went into the room where they were interrogating the Cuban, who was still tied to the chair, but face down on the floor and bloody with a wad of cloth in his mouth. The door shut. Questions in Russian. Muffled screams of pain. Then a dry indiscernible whisper. The door opened.

'He says they never had the boy, they cheat you,' said the Spanish speaker. 'I'm not sure I believe him. Anyway, we work on it. You go now. Wait.'

He reached into his combat trousers, pulled out two disks in their sleeves.

'These are exact replicas of the locked disks numbers 26 and 27, but with different encrypted data. Change these for the originals. They require the same password and encryption software to unlock and unscramble them as the ones you've got in the Jefatura. Bring those originals to us. Now you go. She stays.'

'What?'

'She stays as security,' he said, shrugging. 'We don't have the boy any more.'

'No,' said Falcon. 'I'm not leaving her here. She stays, I stay. You won't get your disks.'

'Wait.'

'You don't need her as security,' said Falcon. 'You know where to find us.'

The Russian went out of the farmhouse. Three minutes. The Cuban's punishment continued. Consuelo had to put her hands over her ears. The front door opened again. The Russian beckoned them out.

'Senor Revnik agrees. Less complicated for us.'

He walked them to the car. The digger worked away in the distance. Consuelo got in the passenger side. The Russian took out a pen torch, slid under the boot of the car, came back out with a small black box in his hand.

'Nearly forgot,' he said. 'Tracking device.'

'You took your time,' said Falcon.

'We had to cover the last three kilometres on foot,' he said. 'But our timing was perfect, no? Not too early so we get nervous and not too late so that you…'

He left it unfinished, said adios, went back to the farmhouse. Falcon joined Consuelo in the lit cockpit of the car. They set off down the track, on to the rough road. They passed a car parked in the long grass, headlights masked with black tape so that only slits were visible. They thumped back up on to the tarmac. Falcon drove hunched over the wheel. He stopped in Castelblanco de los Arroyos, took his police mobile out and ran through the numbers.

'It's a bit too late for the police,' said Consuelo.

'I can't blame you for forgetting that I am supposed to be the police,' said Falcon, still in a rage. 'I've nearly wiped it from my own mind.'

'Who are you calling now?'

'The head of the IT department. He's got to crack the encryption code on those two disks as quickly as possible.'

'Leave it, Javier. It's six in the morning,' said Consuelo. 'You're going to have to do a lot of ugly explaining to some guy you've just woken up and, I can assure you, you'll come out of it badly. Sort it out when you get into the office.'

'What about Revnik? Do you want him after you?'

'I don't care. Let's just go. Revnik will have to learn to be patient. You can delay him somehow. With the disks in police possession, you're in control,' she said. 'I know you want to do something positive after all that horror, but my advice to you now is not to call anybody, because the repercussions will be serious.'

Back in the car, driving through the night. After the tension, a colossal tiredness. He drove with one hand, his arm around Consuelo, her head in his chest. She changed the gears when he needed it. They were silent for some time.

'I know you're angry,' she said.

'I'm angry with myself.'

'I feel as if I've ruined you,' she said.

'I'm not ruined,' he replied, but he thought he probably was.

'I know what that cost you, having to walk away from the dead boy,' she said. 'Because it's cost me, too. They'll bury him in that pit with those people. They'll bury him like a bird that's broken its neck flying into a window. And his mother will never know.'

'I'll face that in the morning,' he said. 'I need the light of day and a mirror for that.'

'I want to come home with you,' she said. 'I don't want to be alone tonight, not even for a few hours.'

He held her tight to his chest.

But he couldn't stop his brain from picking over the mangled wreckage of events. Where had he gone wrong? From the moment he'd started working on Marisa Moreno the Russians had been on to him with their telephone threats. Then they'd contacted Consuelo, and that had confirmed it. But he'd done what Mark Flowers had warned him never to do: put uncorroborated bits of information together to make the picture fit the one he had in his head. He was going to have to remember those phone calls, what time they'd happened, what had occurred before and in between each one, and what was said. What exactly had been said.

'You're thinking,' said Consuelo. 'This is no time for thinking, Javier. You said it yourself. Wait for the light of day. Things will be clearer then.'

He parked outside his house in Calle Bailen. Still not light, time closing in on seven o'clock. They went straight upstairs, stripped off and got into the shower. They washed the filth off each other. The water disappeared black and grey down the drain. She washed her hair. He soaped her shoulders, kneaded the muscles back into life. They sat on the floor of the shower, she between his legs, his arms wrapped around her. The water cascaded down. He kissed the back of her neck.

They got up wordlessly, turned off the water, dried themselves with towels in the dark bedroom, lit only by an oblong of light from the empty bathroom door. She threw the towel away, his dropped to the floor. After the night they'd been through he had no idea why his cock should be so massively swollen. She didn't understand why she felt a desire for him so strong it made her feel twenty all over again. The whole night had been illogical. They came together like fighters, wrestling for position. She bit his shoulder so hard he gasped. He rammed into her with a shuddering vehemence that riveted her to the bed. Their skin slapped together with each questing thrust. She dug her nails into his back, spurred him on with her heels in his buttocks. He couldn't seem to get deep enough inside her. It maddened him so that he quickened his pace and she sensed a great trembling inside her as his heart thumped wildly in his throat and she clung on with the thrill welling in her body and he reached a shuddering collapse and she lay underneath him, crying and beating the mattress with the flat of her hands.

He rolled to the side, drew a sheet up over them, gathered her quivering back to his chest where she fluttered against him like a rescued bird. They slept, still as stone effigies on an ancient sarcophagus in a moonlit chapel.